By Felix Ochieng Akech

Millet farmer Grace Akinyi from Ugunja, Siaya County, has doubled her income since joining a new cooperative that bulk-sells millet to processors and schools, ending years of poor prices and weak markets.

“I used to sell small tins at the local market,” said Grace. “Middlemen offered only Sh70 per kilo, and after paying transport, I was left with almost nothing.”

That changed in 2023, when Grace and 20 other farmers formed the Ugunja Small Grains Cooperative to stop selling individually and find better markets together. With support from the Siaya County Agribusiness Office, the group registered officially and trained on quality improvement, collective bulking, and marketing. They bought a solar dryer and manual thresher through a cost-sharing grant, which improved postharvest quality.

“Before, we dried millet on the ground — birds, dust, and rain spoiled a lot,” said Grace. “Now our grain is cleaner and dries faster, and buyers say it smells and cooks better.”

The county helped the group connect with buyers in Kisumu City, where demand for healthy and traditional foods has grown rapidly. The breakthrough came when they started supplying SmartGrains Millers, a Kisumu-based processor blending millet, amaranth, and sorghum into flour sold as SmartFlour in local supermarkets and health shops.

“SmartGrains buys from us in bulk, about one tonne every two months,” said cooperative chairperson George Omondi. “They told us consumers in towns prefer millet blends because they are healthy and gluten-free.”

The cooperative also supplies St. Anne’s Primary and Ugunja Secondary School, which use millet flour for porridge in their feeding programmes. The schools signed termly supply agreements at fixed prices, creating reliable income for farmers. The group further sells 1kg and 2kg flour packs in local shops and markets in Siaya and Kisumu, including to a health café that uses their flour for millet pancakes and porridge.

According to Dr. Hellen Nduta, a food systems expert at KALRO, the lack of buyers and organized value chains has long discouraged millet farming across western Kenya.

“Millet has always been seen as a subsistence crop,” said Dr. Nduta. “What’s exciting here is that farmers are now linking with processors, schools, and restaurants — turning a traditional crop into a marketable one.”

She said linking millet to school feeding programmes, local bakeries, and millers could double smallholder incomes while improving food security.

Read Also:

Eldoret baker perfects millet bread to replace diabetes-causing, imported wheat

New millet recipes move crop mainstream, drive up sales

Millet bread a silver bullet to halve Kenya’s wheat imports and slash bread prices

Grace said, “Before, I thought success in farming was about how much you plant. Now I know it’s about how well you sell. Markets make the difference.”

The cooperative now earns Sh120 to Sh150 per kilo, nearly double what members previously got from middlemen. Grace has expanded her millet farm from two to six acres and now hires casual labourers during harvest season.

Collective earnings have allowed the group to buy a new storage shed and community solar dryer, register a brand for their flour, access packaging and labelling training, and start talks with two more millers in Kisumu and Busia.

Until recently, many millet farmers across western Kenya complained that they could grow millet but could not sell it. The Ugunja cooperative’s success shows that the problem was not the crop but the missing link between production and processing.

“Millet may be old-fashioned,” said Grace, “but it’s feeding my future.”

Are you a farmer looking to grow the most profitable crop on your farm, with or without irrigation. Use FarmBizAfrica’s HarvestMAX on https://harvestmax.farmbizapps.com and it will tell you in less than a minute what the highest income-earning crops are for your weather, soil type and this season, based on your seasonal weather forecast. Don’t make weather losses ever again, and more than triple your income.